Where Is the Top City to Spot Tech Talent?

Move over Silicon Valley. The U.S. may no longer be the top city where technology professionals go to for business.

According to a new study by LinkedIn, four of the top five cities that technology professionals moved to last year were not in the U.S. but in India–Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai.

The trend underscores the technology boom in the south Asian nation, home to some of the world’s largest outsourcing services firms such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro, as global corporations poured in money to do everything from write software to run call centers and manage networks.

“This data validates how strategically important India is to companies around the world,” said Nishant Rao, country manager for LinkedIn in India. “It is also very telling of where the talent for technology, which is generally scarce, reside,” he said.

On average, 16% of the new residents who moved to new cities had technology skills, LinkedIn data showed. However, most Indian cities had more than double that average.

The study also shows that most new residents with a technology background were those with software infrastructure and programming skills.

The rankings, released this week by Linkedin were based on analyzing the change in location profiles of its 1.5 million members in 52 cities across the world between November 2012 and 2013. LinkedIn has more than 300 million users world-wide, a third of whom are located in the U.S., its largest market.

India ranks a distant second with more than 26 million users on LinkedIn.

According to LinkedIn data, 44% of the more than 60,000 new residents who moved to Bangalore last year had technology skills.

Compare that with the San Francisco Bay Area, which ranked fifth on the list. The city is the new hub in the U.S. with a thriving tech community, where a number of technology firms such as Twitter, Zynga and Dropbox are based.

Close to one in three of the more than 90,000 new residents who moved to the city last year were tech professionals.

“It is hard to find tech talent in the Bay Area,” said Mr. Rao. Also, the high cost of living and rising rental costs make it tough for new talent to live in the city, he said.

The other hubs in the U.S. to which many technology professionals have moved are smaller metropolitan cities such as Seattle and Austin, the data showed.

Down under, Melbourne and Sydney figured right behind the U.S. cities at the tail end of the list.

Below are the top 10 cities to which technology professionals migrated between November 2012 and 2013: